• COUNCILLOR Claudia Webbe, Islington Council’s executive mem­ber responsible for the environ­ment, is a strange type of class warrior.

She is proud of charging the people who go to work on bikes and need storage for their bikes overnight, in order to use the money for other council services and for building social housing.

The same logic, of course, does not apply to cars. Drivers, poor things, cannot afford what people on bikes can easily afford – £2 a week is little to a person who cycles, and a lot to one who drives.

There is a queue of people waiting for bike hangars, Cllr Webbe argues, (£2-a-week a fair price for a bike hangar, March 8). What does that show?

It shows that since for years Cllr Webbe refused to start the hangars scheme there is now a backlog of people waiting for a space.

Islington was the last Labour council in London to install hangars. That took some doing, Councillor Caroline Russell of the Green Party having done most of the work, and myself a little bit of it by walking into the town hall now and then.

Labour councillors have always laughed at any project involving bikes, and I was told where to go off on one occasion.

Three major schemes, Archway, Old Street and Highbury, have been or are being put in to replace previous dangerous, car-infested spaces in Islington, Cllr Webbe points out.

Those are Transport for London schemes. Cllr Webbe cannot gain any personal glory from them, however much she tries.

Old Street, the road rather than the roundabout, has still not been made safe, despite the huge number of people going to work on it by bike every day, and despite consult­ations being envisaged by Cllr Webbe for 2017 – we are now in 2019.

There are 6,400 free-to-use cycle parking spaces across the borough, Cllr Webbe says. Even assuming the figure is correct, what good are those (open-air Sheffield stands) to people who need to lock up their bikes overnight? A bike left outside at night is a stolen bike.

Council estates offer free over­night bike parking, Cllr Webbe main­tains. That is all very well, but it happens to be irrelevant to around 55-60 per cent of the borough.

Those of us who do not live on council estates are all millionaires in Cllr Webbe’s view of the class system, of course, but it doesn’t feel that way to most of us, I suspect.

People who need bike hangars cannot store bikes in communal corridors, because that would be a hazard and would invalidate house insurance. (Please, forgive my bourgeois view of things; I have a feeling Cllr Webbe’s idol Jeremy Corbyn is house-insured though…)

Is it even remotely possible that the cost of bike hangars would have been lower if Cllr Webbe had suspended her class view of the world for a while and applied for Transport for London money, installing bike hangars when people started asking for them many years ago, as Hackney and Lambeth Labour councils did?

Is extracting money from people who move around healthily on bikes and do not cause traffic jams and deadly air pollution, the right way to finance council services, while charging drivers less?

ANITA FRIZZARIN
Wedmore Gardens, N19